This story “The Maternal Instinct”
by V.S. Naipaul is about a prostitute woman named Laura that has eight children.
Her house was full of violence and her children were from 7 different fathers except
for the last 2 children that were from Nathaniel, the only man that stayed with
her and gave her 2 children. Nathaniel stayed with her even if she used to beat
him; he always used to say that he was the one who beat her.
Even if Laura wasn’t a good example
for her children, she wanted that none of them be like her. That’s why she
wanted that all of her children get educated. Laura used to say: “It have
nothing like education in the world. I don’t want my children to grow like me.”
But we can see that her older daughter named Lorna got pregnant even if she was
educated. “The eldest daughter, Lorna, came home from her typing lessons late
one night and said, ‘Ma, I going to make a baby.’ I heard the shriek that Laura
gave. And for the first time I heard Laura crying. It wasn’t ordinary crying.
She seemed to be crying all the cry she had saved up since she was born”.
This is an example of how a parent
should raise a child, because if you want your child to be a good person in the
future you should not settle by telling them to be a good person. You as a
parent have to be an example for them. You should show them how to live and be
good people. Lorna must have showed to her children how to go forward with a
decent job and treated her children better, with love, and only caring for them
and not being behind males. We can see the sad end that the story become for
Laura, she was so ashamed of what her daughter did that she didn’t show up on
the street because she knows it was because of her bad parenting. She was even relieved
when the police told her that her daughter Lorna died drowned, she said: “It
good. It good. It better that way.” Maybe she was relieved because her daughter’s
life may have ended worst like her mother’s life. Also we can infer that Lorna committed
suicide because of her mother’s reaction to the news of having a baby. One
character said: “Is what they always do, swim out and out until they tired and
can’t swim no more.” Maybe the daughter thought that her mother will be proud if
she become like her, like the example her mother gave her. This is a disaster
that occurred because of the mother bad behavior.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7w6rDDD_lCo
The teacher told us to write 5 times in a week in a free line notebook.
She told us to write in a free line notebook because we needed to feel free and
without any restrictions when were writing in the journal. The only rules we
had were: that we don’t get logical, that we need to write whatever comes to
our mind, and that we need to keep writing without worrying about the spelling
and grammar. We cannot cross out, we need to just be free and write everything
you want without caring about the reader because no one will read it; not even
the teacher. With this project I learned to be fluent and learned more
vocabulary. Also this project helped me a lot to express myself without
worrying that someone will read it and without trying to be perfect. Those
papers were everything I had on my mind. Also it helped me to organize my
feelings and thoughts. It helped me to know more about me and about the mess I
used to have on my mind. But I wasn’t always writing about the situations I had
or the plans I got on my mind, sometimes I wrote none sense stuff; it was just
expressions in a paper. In the other hand we also did a
life compass. We needed to do 3 life compasses in our journal. It consist in a
circle with four lines similar to a north, south, east, west compass, but
instead of the locations we had on it: spiritual, emotional, mental, and
physical. We had to write next to each word in a scale of 0 to 3 how we were
feeling. For example if I was very sad or angry I was supposed to write 0, and
if I was happy I was supposed to write 3. Like the journal entries this life
compasses helped me organized my feelings and know how exactly I was felling at
that moment. Also it helped me know how I’m supposed to work with my feelings
letting me know which one was lower.
I got 40 journal entries and 30 life compasses also my mental status were
in total 73, my emotional status were in total 55, my spiritual status were in
total 54, and my physical status were in total 55. I got 31% in mental and 23%
in the other ones. Like you can see I have a balance between my emotional,
spiritual and physical status, but when it comes to mental you can see that
when I grab the pen to write in my notebook I have a lot of thoughts and they
are very constant. But that’s not always like that, sometimes I was in blank
and like I said I wrote a lot of none sense stuff because of that. Also I did
charts of my feelings and I can see that my emotional, spiritual and physical
relate a little, especially the emotional and the spiritual. I can see that the
days I was very sad I wasn’t very spiritual and sometimes it was reflected in
my body, in my physical status. The lower number in physical also reflects that
I’m almost always in pain because of my back, and the lower numbers in my
emotional and spiritual status at the final days reflects the sadness I have
been passing through; sadness that my journal helped me relieved.
